A lovesome thing by Kate Hext
The mysterious world of an unusual English garden
In 1899, Arthur Graham moved to Great Ambrook, between Newton Abbot and Totnes in south Devon. He had studied Mods and Greats at Christ Church, Oxford, and in London he became acquainted with literary characters including Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, his cousin Sholto Osborne Gordon Douglas, an aspiring writer, and the novelist Frederick Rolfe, who styled himself as “Baron Corvo”. Rolfe was intrigued by, and even a little obsessed with, this wealthy young aesthete. In his homoerotic roman à clef Nicholas Crabbe (posthumously published in 1958), he fictionalized Graham as Theophanes Clayfoot, who lives between London and Sonorusciello, an estate in Devon, before “cryptic” difficulties force him to leave the city for good.
With some context, these difficulties may be deciphered. From 1895, it was risky to be a man who was sexually interested in other men, as Graham and his circle were. Oscar Wilde’s trial for “acts of gross indecency” in the spring of 1895 had been a test case for the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, and his conviction showed how dangerous “the love that dare not speak its name” could be when articulated in a courtroom. W. B. Yeats later banded together the young men associated with Wilde and the decadent movement as “the tragic generation”, their early deaths or ruination symbolic of a self-indulgent style that would not outlive the century.
Graham was not to be one of the 1890s’ tragedies or scandals. As he slipped into an unrecorded life at Great Ambrook, perhaps he knew that he was saving himself. When he died in 1928, aged fifty-six, his papers were burnt on his instruction. “With freedom, flowers, books, and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”, Wilde asked from within the walls of Reading Gaol. We do not know whether Graham was perfectly happy, but the signs suggest he was content. He attended church in a local village, corresponded with local men serving on the Western Front and donated to good causes.
After renting Great Ambrook for almost a decade, he bought it with an inheritance and engaged the architect Thomas Henry Lyon – another gay man who was to become the inaugural director of design at the School of Architecture in Cambridge – to extend the house with a large music room. Lyon then turned to the garden. Four acres were carved out of the fields above, and away from, the house, and “girdled round”, like Xanadu, with walls 15ft high, covered with wire trellis for vines to grow up and around, like camouflage, inside and out.
A photograph of Graham, taken when work on the garden began, shows a quintessential Edwardian gentleman with a lean, clean-shaven face above a fashionable stand collar, captured in half expectation.
Although well-off, he was hardly Kubla Khan: four acres is barely a third as big as the gardens at Garsington Manor, bought by Ottoline Morrell in 1913; and a mere fragment of the 270-acre plot at Busbridge Hall, Surrey, redesigned by Gertrude Jekyll, Edwin Lutyens and Harold Peto for Graham’s brother Percy around 1906. Arthur’s was a relatively modest utopia. It was typical, in some ways, of a new gardening fashion among the demi-wealthy for whom Jekyll wrote bestselling books. In Home and Garden (1900) and Wall and Water Gardens (1901), she changed the character of the country garden, embodying English traditions and Christian morality in her mixed borders and water features.
At Great Ambrook, Graham and Lyon had different ambitions. With the commercial importation of plants and flowers from warmer climates – orchids, hyacinths and magnolias – and new plate-glass hothouses in which to cultivate them, the upper-middle classes could now have audacious, bright, fragrant Italian gardens. Planting patterns for Great Ambrook are lost, but we know that exotic specimens grew there. Care and money went into their selection, with a hothouse at either end of the garden. Tags, unearthed since 2016 – when new owners began to recover and restore the garden with a dedicated team of local volunteers – show that camellias were imported from Lake Maggiore. Their winter-flowering whites and yellows mingled with western red cedars, plum pines and windmill palms, all fast-growing evergreens introduced to England in the nineteenth century. Between 1909 and 1912, a local builder, Lewis Bearne, brought many tons of limestone up the narrow lanes from Dartmoor to build an Italian garden with a different sort of grandeur to that dreamt up by Jekyll, Peto and Lutyens.
If high walls are the first hint that Great Ambrook had secrets to keep, and Graham’s circle of friends suggests why, then Rolfe’s fictionalization deepens the intrigue. The author transcribed letters and caricatured acquaintances in a quartet of novels. In the second of these, Nicholas Crabbe, the title figure is typically Corvine: a self-loathing figure, struggling, in barely disguised scenarios from Rolfe’s recent life, with agents and publishers who fail to pay him, while he strives to maintain the integrity of his writing.
Crabbe then meets a captivating, sick man called Kemp (modelled on Sholto Douglas) and gently nurses him back to health, while accruing crippling debts. They begin to write together, seized by the tenderness and vigour with which their minds work, and by the hope that their book will be a success. But Crabbe is denied his happy ending when Kemp is dazzled by a chance encounter with Theophanes Clayfoot, who takes him away to Sonorosciello. There they remain. Alone in his London bedsit, Crabbe cannot understand why he has been shut out, why he is told so little. Clayfoot mistrusts words and avoids written communication, while Kemp avers that his new friend is wonderful in ways that cannot be articulated. What goes on at Sonorusciello? Crabbe sadly concludes that he can be certain only of one thing: “He knew that he didn’t know”. With his heart hollowed out by unspoken sorrow and no credit left, Crabbe declines a last invitation to visit.
We do not know whether Rolfe ever took up (or declined) an invitation to Great Ambrook, but others surely did. It is a garden designed for parties. A portico abuts its wall for guests to be deposited and collected, with a gate leading to a wide circular limestone terrace that looks out to Dartmoor and Hay Tor on the horizon. The question of who joined Graham and possibly Sholto Douglas, and what they got up to, remains as cryptic to us as it was to Rolfe. A few remaining photographs show official visitors outside the garden walls, next to the house. The Devon and Exeter Gazette notes that local servicemen on leave during the First World War “were ever welcome at Great Ambrook, where they knew a good time awaited them”. Without diaries, letters, or intimate reminiscences, factual knowledge of Graham comes mostly from obituaries. These sketch a dutiful, public-spirited citizen, albeit one who was “strongly averse to the publication of his beneficent acts”.
Below the terrace, the garden is laid out as a promenade, with paths sweeping down between deep double borders and rills. English designers had learnt from Italy the trick of springing the unexpected on garden wanderers, but Lyon does it in his own way, eschewing open vistas and geometric designs for disorientating turns and asymmetries. One path through a 111ft-long pergola leads to Apostles Walk, lined with twelve cedar trees and twelve holly trees, for God and country. Another takes visitors beneath high palms to the centre of the garden, where, in place of a water feature, there is an Alpine dell and a grotto. In 1908, Reginald Farrer’s My Rock-Garden began a trend for rockeries, but this is more dramatic than anything Farrer imagined: a former quarry and carrion pit remade into a domestic vision of the sublime. Coming across it is a moment of discovery; here, fantasy and romance unmake the emerging conventions of the early twentieth-century garden.
Within its subtle disorientations and eclecticism, our expectations of design are altered. Italian principles come together with bold, unadorned Arts and Crafts architecture in à la mode reinforced concrete. Then, rounding a corner on the far side, another surprise gives the game away: a sunken Roman bath, complete with a peristyle, over stone benches and, beyond it, an octagonal plunge bath. With a small courtyard for games, a pavilion and a grass court, it is a Greco-Roman gymnasium in miniature. The early-twentieth-century English Italian garden didn’t have any such thing. In the hands of Peto or Lutyens, water features were ornamental fountains and rills.
There was a contemporary infuence, but not from guides to modern garden design. In 1914 Sholto Douglas, still a regular visitor to Great Ambrook, published A Theory of Civilisation, subtly taking up John Addington Symonds’s suggestion that athletic vigour and enthusiasm were evidence of classical civilization at its robust peak. There is no hint of homoeroticism in Douglas’s book, but in A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883), Symonds had conjured ancient Greece as a model for reconceiving love between men in the modern world, with the gymnasium as “the place at Athens where lovers enjoyed the greatest freedom”.
Graham’s garden gymnasium epitomizes an athletic, homosocial way of life that was unliveable in England except in books and secret spaces. All gardens are sites of labour, planning, plotting and failure, but this one was designed by Lyon as a stage for fantasy and pleasure. In this way it has more in common with Villa Farnese or Hadrian’s Villa than with Edward Carpenter’s queer “simple life” in his market garden at Millthorpe in Derbyshire. Still, Great Ambrook is a country garden, its naughtiness softened by tender localism. The irreverence of its designs coexists with patriotism and faith; audacity mingles with reserve, and modernity with a sense of history. In the gymnasium, love seats are carved in rose-seamed Ipplepen marble, and Devon’s characteristic deep pink limestone blocks stud the walls of the summerhouse. These touches naturalize “the love that dare not speak its name” and make the speaking somehow less necessary. Here, an unexpected encounter or forbidden assignation could be electrified into a nervy thrill, not a shameful crime. This is a place to be unseen without being secretive; where activities speak for themselves, unconstrained by a language that enrols its subject in a system of definitions.
It was not unusual for queer writers across the long turn of the century to entertain the futile hope that they might evade the fixities of language. Walter Pater glimpses a sensual life in which “we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch”. Virginia Woolf is marvellously frustrated by the “compromise, evasion, understatement, overstatement, irrelevance and downright falsehood which we call biography”, declaring that to understand a person, “Words are an impure medium; better far to have been born into the silent kingdom of paint”. Rolfe’s Crabbe is also frustrated by words: by the missing expressions of affirmation he longs to receive, and by those he writes in search of approval. His fixation on Clayfoot is not just jealousy of Kemp. He also envies Clayfoot’s apparently good-humoured vanishing within what he longs to create for himself, “a carapax of secrecy and mystery”.
When Graham died in February 1928, his funeral at Ipplepen parish church was attended by Sholto Douglas. Lewis Bearne played the organ. It was a simple affair. His will specified “no wreaths of bought flowers.” The estate was auctioned off and the garden fell into disrepair in the 1960s. One day more recently, as I wandered under the pergola, one of the garden’s new volunteers, pulling up dandelions, looked up. “You’ll think I’m mad”, she said, “but I feel Arthur Graham’s spirit here. We all do.” To those of us who deal in words and the facts they convey, this may raise an eyebrow. Graham is, though, the shaping spirit of his garden. Together with Douglas, assorted visiting servicemen and unknown others, he lived in this “silent kingdom” created for him by Lyon and Bearne. Within its walls, he was determined that neither he nor what happened within would be solidified into words, but would disappear on the luminous sun of a soft late afternoon.
Kate Hext is an Associate Professor at the University of Exeter. Her most recent book is Wilde in the Dream Factory, 2024